In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session, we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success. Focusing in on topics ranging from

• Organization designs used by WL Gore, The Dunbar number

• Delivery Triads - Product, Delivery, Technical Excellence

• Venture capital style funding

• Focusing on business value

The second half of the session is a workshop focused on creating a Value Stream Container and resource based on team funding 

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

 Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.  

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

This will be a live example of how to use life events and analogies that are relatable to the fundamentals of Scrum. I will walk through my own personal backlog of living on the water and tie the trials and tribulations of such back to a Scrum Model. The details I share will be described in parallel to concepts that resemble a host of Agile themes. The intent is to have the audience consider some of their own personal experiences and how they can use those in future conversations to overcome challenges or resistance around transforming their model.

One short activity is facilitated during the presentation that engages the audience. This is intended to emphasize the importance of getting to know your audience and highlight the repercussions of relying on assumptions.

Data, the way that we process it and store it, is one of many important aspects of IT. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision-making. For our DevOps strategy to be truly effective we must be able to safely and quickly evolve production databases, just as we safely and quickly evolve production code. Yet for many organizations their data sources prove to be less than trustworthy and their data-oriented development efforts little more than productivity sinkholes. We can, and must, do better.  

If database evolution isn’t an explicit part of your DevOps strategy then you’re not really doing DevOps yet, are you?

When Agile first came on the scene it was premised around putting the customer first. But, over the years its focus has evolved and the general perception of Agile today is that it’s mostly a tool for delivering software. Agile’s original focus was mainly on developers and testers, but it never really contemplated design thinking as a discipline. Design thinking, which has been around for decades but is only recently having its ‘moment in the sun’, compliments agile beautifully in that it focuses on trying to solve the right problems for the right people. Design thinking allows us to iterate and test assumptions before too much coding and production-readiness is done, which helps ensure the team is investing in the right things at every stage. It really provides a focus on innovating rather than simply burning down a backlog. In this talk we will discuss different ways to incorporate design thinking into the agile process. You will learn how to yield benefits from bringing these two practices together – most importantly how to best serve the users of the product or service you are delivering. At Scotiabank, we’ve been using these fantastic tools in combination for over a year. It is a journey, and although we haven’t completely solved everything yet, there are a lot of lessons we have learned that can be applied elsewhere.

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle.

What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition?

This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it. Guiding attendees through the latest research with practical exercises to demonstrate the issues and open discussion to find answers to the following questions:

• What does diversity mean? How does it relate to me? 
• Why does diversity matter in effective teams? 
• How can teams where everyone is different be effective? 
• How can we increase diversity in our organisations? 
• Is positive discrimination a feasible and ethical way to achieve diversity in our organisations? 
• How can I employ a diverse group, when they are not applying?

Diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it's critical to effective organisations.

In this session, I will walk you through some areas of my childhood, introduce you to my father and explain you how I've used facilitation skills to fight back daddy's illness (alcoholism). During this session, you'll learn more about who I am, and if you pay attention or participate, maybe you'll take away two or three facilitation techniques combined with an inspiring and personal happy ending story.

This session is focused around leading your teammates toward success over managing them off a cliff.

Most of us who have had the pleasure of coaching a scrum team have adopted the mindset of servant leadership. But what about directors and middle management?!

Do you have teammates reporting to you who work on Scrum teams that you’re not part of?

Do you report to a manager that might as well be on another planet?

If you answered YES to either of these questions, this session is for you. We’ll talk through the shift of leading over managing and how we can use the framework of the retrospective as a tool to bridge gaps, manage performance and promote transparency. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or individual contribution, the values and mechanisms we review can be brought back to your organization.

The Titanic was going 42 km/hr when an iceberg was spotted dead ahead. I imagine there was a wild scramble to do something to save the ship. I often wonder if they had rearranged the deckchairs, as I’m sure the outcome would have been different. As crazy as this sounds, there are many organizations who rearrange the deck chairs and can’t figure out why their transformation continues to fail. Adding more process, firing leadership and coaches, planning for efficiency, throwing more money at the problem and so much more. None of which helps the situation, and if anything speeds up the inevitable.

In times of change, your response to the problems you will encounter can make the difference between success and failure. During this session, you will learn The Responsibility Process^TM, and you will start to understand and know how your response to problems is creating your reality. You will also start to understand how by creating an environment of shared responsibility, it is possible to avoid the icebergs (or at least survive the collision).

I hear it all the time in my work: “That’s nice in theory, but it’s not possible to do that here because .” Or perhaps it’s “There’s no way I could do .” Whatever the story, whether in a personal or corporate context, people tell me all the time how a change is not possible. Here’s the secret though: when we approach a problem from a place of being impossible it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Leadership is one of the most complex and potentially rewarding things you can do in life. Leading for Change starts with seeing your own fears and stories, and choosing to move past them. In this session, we will be working together to confront a fear almost every one of us has. What you will come to learn is that it’s possible to write your story your way, and not be controlled by them. When leaders learn to confront their fears, their impact goes far beyond what they and those they lead thought of as possible.